062414 Bill Frisell, Ottawa, ON
June 24th, 2014 was a jazzfest evening that was astoundingly memorable for me, one that contained a somewhat crushing low, an incredible highlight, and a self-defeating decision that remains submerged in regret…
Author: Todd Snelgrove
I've been having a lot of fun these past fifty-odd years. I've busked and bicycled through more places I can count, taught music and caught dengue fever, managed a band that toured all over North America and worked with Canada's National Orchestra for two decades. I've traveled countless miles to see a thousand concerts, played hundreds of gigs, won in Vegas and lost in Estonia, worked as a concert promoter, university instructor, janitor, and entertainment writer, seen the Grateful Dead and hiked the Dogon Valley, ran the stairs of the CN Tower and pedalled across Scandinavia once and Newfoundland twice. I've visited the graves of Alexander the Great and the great Robert Johnson, drunk excessively with some of the best and worst people you can imagine, and I've slept in some very, very weird places. Several years ago I started writing some of it down, and much of it is collected here for your perusal.
062307 Dave Brubeck, Ottawa, ON
Dave Brubeck was almost ninety years old so I wasn’t expecting much more than an appearance really, but even at that stage of the game the now-late pianist was still right on time, as it were. It was a beautiful night out and the amazing weather was perfectly augmented by the high-quality on-kilter compound jazz…
062115 Chris Botti/Timber Timbre, Ottawa, ON
A viola player dies and finds himself banished to Hell. He takes his seat in the string section of a large orchestra and starts playing along…
062008 Wynton Marsalis, Ottawa, ON
I gotta tell you, someone has got to have a lot of concerts under their belt to have seen a jazz heavyweight like Wynton Marsalis perform in a beautiful setting like Confederation Park on a pleasant summer’s eve and remember not a single thing about it…
061904 Phish, Saratoga Springs, NY
I’ll tell you what I remember about June 19th, 2004…
061895 Grateful Dead/Bob Dylan, East Rutherford, NJ
At this point Jerry Garcia only had fourteen shows left in him…
061710 Phish, Hartford, CT
June 17th, 2010 was the first night of a two-night Phish run in Hartford, Connecticut. M’lady and I were staying with the Frayler’s…
061607 Sisters Euclid, Ottawa, ON
My friend’s wedding reception featured one of the most fun Sisters Euclid sets ever! In addition to tearing through a pile of their regular awesomeness that was quite familiar to most of us in the small, hand-picked crowd, the band tossed out a few fun nods to standard wedding band fare too…
061116 Must Stash Hat, Ottawa, ON
On June 11th, 2016 I rode my bike to Westboro in Ottawa’s west end to see Must Stash Hat in my friend’s backyard…
060913 The Rolling Stones, Montreal, QC
Sure I had seen the Rolling Stones 50th Anniversary show in Brooklyn back when it was just a five-show tour and I even got tickets for their Toronto show when they announced a proper North American tour, but this is The Rolling Stones, and Montreal is so close to Ottawa I just couldn’t pass it up…
Todd Man Out 